Slashdot Mirror
Computerized Betting System Proves Vulnerable
count3r writes "A front page article in today's New York Times reports that an employee of Autotote has been fired for (allegedly) hacking the system responsible for 65% of all horseracing bets in North America. The caper, if it is indeed a caper, resulted in a series of six bets that paid a total of $3,000,000 in last Saturday's Breeders' Cup."
Or why don't we look at one of the many articles that don't require registration. Darn NYTimes.
A lot of people make a lot of money on internet gambling sites without breaking a single law. The people who play online poker suck so bad compared to professional poker players that it is like printing money for anyone who plays the game seriously. I suck which is why I don't play, but a lot of people are willing to give up there hard earned money to a redneck who has played poker since before he could write.
It may not get you $3M, but they won't have to work anymore, and they don't get put in FPMA prison.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Also, the ocean is wet, and there is porn on the internet.
Just so you know.
The problem is that betting is all pool driven.
A lopsided payout will be noticed, not because someone one, people always win in a properly booked race/game/whatever, it is that the payout was disproportionate to the take.
If you make your book properly, you aren't making money off of people losing their bets, you make money off of the vig. Your payouts and take should roughly be equal if you did your books right.
A horse isn't a 100:1 long shot because the book maker thinks its a bad horse. The horse is a 100:1 long shot, because off all the betting dollars, only 1 out of every 100 dollars was bet on that horse.
The only way the house wins is to avoid making stupid bets. How does the house avoid making stupid bets? By nt betting. If I make sure that the other 99 dollars are going to cover your 1 dollar bet, and I collect the 10% vig from the losers, I make money, and don't have to worry about the long shot.
Legalized horse betting does the same thing, except since they can't charge a vig to the losers, they don't make a 100% payout. That way, no matter who wins, they have made sure they can cover the bets, and still make a profit. In this scenerio, the winner pays the vig in the shape of the odds aren't as high as they should have been, the winner didn't win as much as was proportionally alloted to him.
The reason why this was a dumb scheme, and the reason why they got caught is pure math. The track paid out more money then they took in, and immediately knew something was amiss. If the systems worked properly, that can't happen. Long shots hit all the time, even 100:1 long shots, but if your computer system adjusted the odds according to the bets made before post, you won't lose money.
The fact that they changed the bet afterward means that the odds were wrong. Of course most people don't realize these subtelties to book making, so probably thought it wasn't a dumb mistake.
It's still confusing no matter how many times I read it, but it sounds like he made six identical bets, when the point of the pick-six ticket is to place several different bets on one ticket. Anyone who can clarify this a bit more, please do.
Scientific Games also does lotteries. Here is how they are rigged. Only the gangsters running the rackets make money from gambling.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
You've got a great memory - that was 6 years ago. :-)
Here's the story from "The Risks Digest" ("Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems").
Basicly, they caught the guy, and then released him and even gave him the money back with interest.
The "source" of the problem? A missing clock that was supposed to seed the random number generator. Thus, upon rebooting (every morning I suppose), the same number sequence would be generated as the seed would be the same...
Greg
Loopsh of fury.
The reason why this was a dumb scheme, and the reason why they got caught is pure math. The track paid out more money then they took in
No, the win did not pay out more than the track earned. Each winning ticket paid $428,392 from a pool of $4,569,515, which means that there were probably 8 or 9 winning tickets in total, nationwide. The guy they are investigating had 6 of them.
Having 6 of only 9 winning tickets is obviously unusual. His betting strategy is even more unusual... making single selections for 4 races, then "wheeling" then entire field for the last 2, which means if the first four come in, he's guaranteed to win. Combined with the "flaw" in the system which doesn't report the ticket to the central database until after the fourth race, this is an obvious red flag. Finally, making the same bet 6 times is simply stupid. It's the same as buying 6 lottery tickets with all of the same numbers... the only justification is to increase your percentage of the winner's pool if you KNOW you are going to win.
Think of recent Powerball lottery wins... if they announce there were 6 winners, and one guy shows up with 4 of the winning tickets, it's going to raise eyebrows.
Had this guy never made these wagers, most likely there would have been 2 legit winners, each of whom would have won about $1.8 million (or maybe 3 winners each getting $1.2 mil). Instead, since there were a lot more winning tickets, the payout on each was reduced to only $428 thousand.
Again, the track didn't lose anything, and if they disqualify his tickets, the money will get paid to the legit winners. That's how pari-mutual wagering works... the total pool is calculated, the house percenatge is taken out, and everything left is split among the winning tickets. When there are 9 winning tickets, each one gets paid less than if there were 3 winning tickets. The racetrack is unaffected. The legitimate winners are the victims.